Max Levy

ABOUT MAX LEVY POST CIVIL WAR - LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY: From home in Fort Wayne Indiana, Uncle Max went southward to make his fortune landing in Tallulah/Lake Providence on the shores of the Mississippi where he, what else, opened a small store - later a department store and later the family appears to have had at least one drug store as well.Some family members had the name Bloom or Blum That's all I know although some members of the family may know some cousins - maybe ask cousins Shirley London or Saranne Chayefsky.

SAM LEVY Uncle Sam went to Nashville where he married and started a dynasty around Sam Levy & Co. 222 Public Square a wholesale shoe company serving a large area of the Southland His family, that of the Cohens and the Simons among others, spread far and wide and included some very interesting people. One, Marion Ruth (Rufus) was for many years the personal representative and seceretary of her best friend Dinah Shore and travelled the world with her. Others became executives in International Shoe Company of St. Louis. Sam was instrumental in his nephew, Isidore (Uncle Izzy) coming to Nashville and marrying into the same family circle and joining the shoe company. A tremendous number of Jews in the South were in one way or another related through this center.

HARRIS LEVY Zaydie Harris (d. 1916) moved to New York becasue Fort Wayne was not frum enough and opened a saloon at 51 Bayard Street where he lived with his burgeoning family (Hyman was born when they lived at 100 Bayard Street) moving uptown in stages whrough 108th Street and Madison Avenue and finally to 1366 St. Nicholas Avenue in the Heights. He was a macher in the Audobon Avenue Shul which has moved to Bergenfield NJ and his name is on a memorial plaque there to this day.

His fine name was immortalized (at least for the century) in Harris Shor Levy of Worcester Mass.( where Hyman (Daddy) had moved to take a job running a woollen mill (later owned it)) who was the first male grandkid born after his death (I guess you could add, the only and the last as well as first). Hyman had married the sister of a cousin-in-law Hannah Shor the daughter of either Abram or David. Hannah's Mother was Mary and at least later in life, she lived in Atlantic City NJ.

Hannah had siblings, one of whom was Joe who lived in Halls Tennessee and was married to another member of the Cohen family (same as Sam and Izzy etc) he had a departmentr store in Halls and for a while another in Jackson. His son Louis was an officer in the Army during WW-II and married, had one or more children but dies young sometime not too long thereafter. Joe was the lay chaplain at the Dyersburg Army Air Base in Halls during the war and young Harris and his new wife Rose were lucky enough to live in Halls for a year or so while Harris was in the Air Force. Joe's home, always open was the local JEW-S-O and was always crowded with soldiers and Wacs and air crew members - eating herring, salami, and slurping chicken soup among other treats.

We are a big family but mostly anonymous/